Marx and I, having been wrong about how the class contradictions within the Republican party were going to work themselves out, but not about how far the politics of ignorance could really go once it had actually taken over the leading strings of government, are now preparing something useful and new.


When different people say the word "socialism," they make roughly the same sounds but may mean quite different things. We are going to look at the things the word can properly mean, including and emphasizing scientific socialism.



Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Citizen Pocan and the Truth


Citizen Pocan is lucky he didn’t have to take the test you have to pass to become a naturalized citizen. He would have got at least one question wrong.
The only powers the United States can constitutionally exercise are those specifically enumerated powers delegated by the several states and through them by the people. The power to guarantee the right to vote was not so delegated. It’s not that the United State does not guarantee the right to vote; it’s that it cannot. Only the states can. They retained, they did not delegate, that power. And it seems to me that for the most part, they use it; they do guarantee the right in question. The negative guarantees Constitutional amendments give to former slaves, women, and persons aged 18 or older are the result of fresh delegations of power by the legislatures of three fourths of the states.
The constitutional lawyers the PolitiFact investigators of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel engaged to confirm Mr. Representative Pocan’s claim of course know this is its explanation. That does not render the claim itself true. It is rather an obnoxious piece of ignorance, and as such quite completely false. Publishing it as true is a disservice to a public already superstitious about such matters.
It is more difficult to explain why the claim is misleading and false than just to make it. But the explanation is not something contemporary readers of the Federalist Papers – lay citizens – would likely have misunderstood. And the difficulty does not afford an excuse either to Mr. Pocan for making the claim, or to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for rating it true.

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